«Evocai versi e romanzi come tranquillanti. Forse, pensai, aver studiato mi serve solo a questo: a calmarmi.»
"I called up poems and novels like tranquillizers. Maybe, I thought, this is all my studying is good for: calming me down."
(Margherita Bienne, caption): In Ferrante, studying is one of the few ways to build some distance from where you come from. But that distance doesn't automatically mean freedom: often it serves to keep a balance, to stop your surroundings from overwhelming you completely. A use of literature that has little of the abstract and a lot of the concrete, almost physiological.